The Mammoth Book of Losers

by Karl Shaw

  Winless in his ninety-nine starts, Zippy Chippy’s final loss came in September 2004 at the Three County Fairgrounds, Northampton, Massachusetts. He was sent off as the 7-2 second favourite with a huge party of fans there cheering him on. Despite the support, he finished last. Tom Gilcoyne, historian for the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame, noted optimistically that the horse “hasn’t done anything to harm the sport. But it’s a little bit like looking at the recorded performances of all horse races through the wrong end of the telescope.”

  Zippy Chippy’s career as a four-legged flop is only bettered by Britain’s Quixall Crossett, the first thoroughbred in racing history to lose 100 consecutive races.

  The eleven-year career of the “equine turtle” took in 103 starts over jumps, giving his owner Ted Caine a grand total of no victories, two second-place and six third-place finishes, although this was usually when most of its rivals fell. Even in races with a field as small as five, Quixall Crossett regularly started with odds of 500-1, and sometimes went off at odds of 1,500-1. The Racing Post once noted of the horse’s efforts: “Ran a cracker by his standards when he was second of two finishers in May.”

  As his hundredth race loomed in 2001, an astrologer brought in to help try to avoid a century of disasters found “planetary transits which could cause nervous tension and lead to him being hyped up. His chart shows he can have problems channelling his energies in the right area, and also a tendency to be impulsive and a touch accident prone. Thankfully, Mars is due to start moving in the right direction two days before Quixall’s race . . . and he will be less likely to get hurt.” Quixall Crossett managed to complete a circuit before being pulled up.

  He quit the racing game for good in 2002 after unseating his rider on his 103rd defeat.

  Least Successful Race Fix

  The English multi-millionaire newspaper baron and fraudster Horatio Bottomley owned several racehorses but never achieved success in the Derby or the Grand National, even though he spent a fortune trying to achieve this ambition. He was also famous for losing a great deal of money on failed betting coups.

  In 1914, Bottomley thought he had organized the perfect swindle. He found an out-of-the-way racecourse at Blankenberge on the Belgian coast and bought all six horses entered for one of the races, hired six English jockeys and paid them to finish in a specified order. Then he put a huge amount of money on the outcome. What could possibly go wrong?

  Sadly, Bottomley had overlooked just one key factor – you can never bet on the weather. A sea mist came in and covered the entire course. The jockeys couldn’t see each other or work out who had won. Bottomley lost a fortune.

  “Video won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”

  Darryl F. Zanuck, Head of Twentieth Century-Fox Studios, 1946

  Least Successful Horse Race

  A global TV audience of 250 million people tuned in to watch the 1993 Grand National, “the race that never was”.

  The sequence of events that brought about the most embarrassing race in steeplechase history began when fifteen animal rights demonstrators ran on to the Aintree course seconds before the race was due to start. The horses had arrived at the start at least ten minutes ahead of schedule and, after several minutes walking around in the rain that was lashing relentlessly on to the runners and riders, patience was wearing thin. The starter, Keith Brown, who was officiating at his last Grand National before retirement, finally called the horses into line and was just about to pull the lever and shout “Come on!” when several of the thirty-nine riders spotted the protestors ahead and stood up in their saddles, pointing. After a delay while the course was cleared, the tape failed to rise properly, half-strangling champion jockey Richard Dunwoody. Brown raised his red flag to declare a false start, but it didn’t unfurl and half of the field continued unchecked.

  The crowd shouted frantically at the jockeys to stop as race officials tried desperately to flag them down from the side of the track. Nine horses did pull up before the first fence but the rest of the field charged on. When they reached The Chair, a couple of Aintree officials tried to attract their attention again but the jockeys mistook them for protesters. Ten runners stopped after the first circuit but seven horses raced on to the finish line in the four-and-a-half-mile race. Esha Ness, a 50-1 outsider ridden by John White, crossed the line first and was devastated when he found out the race had been declared null and void. Keith Brown, wearing his bowler hat and a terrified expression, was given a police escort through a gauntlet of irate race goers.

  Bookmakers had to repay £75 million in bets placed on the race. Not least among the disgruntled punters was Judy Higby, a housewife from St Albans, Hertfordshire. She had tried to place a bet with her local bookie that the 1993 Grand National would not be run after she had had a premonition. Her bookie told her that he would do her a favour by not taking her money because it could never happen.

  Worst Jockey

  The Spanish aristocrat Beltran de Osorio y Diez de Rivera, the “Iron” Duke of Albuquerque, decided to take up horse-racing after receiving a film of the Grand National as a gift for his eighth birthday. He set his sight on winning England’s greatest steeplechase and almost died trying.

  The Duke entered the National seven times from 1952. The outcome was nearly always the same. He would usually start with the rest of the field, jump a few fences and then wake up in hospital.4 On his first attempt, he fell from his horse at the sixth fence and was hospitalized after almost breaking his neck. He tried to win again in 1963 and was unseated again, this time at the fourth fence, much to the delight of bookies who were offering odds of 66-1 against him finishing. Two years later, he fell and broke a leg after his horse collapsed beneath him. Over the course of his painful career he managed to finish only one race.

  In 1974, just after having sixteen screws removed from his leg after another nasty fall in another race, he fell again while training for the National, breaking his collarbone. He competed in a plaster cast, finishing the race for the only time in his career in eighth (and last) place, a very long way behind the winner Red Rum. The Duke was delighted, but noted after the race, “I sat like a sack of potatoes and gave the horse no help.”

  At one point, his horse collided with Ron Barry at the second Canal Turn. Barry said, “What the fuck are you doing?” to which the Duke replied, “My dear chap, I haven’t a clue. I’ve never got this far before!”

  In 1976, he sustained his worst injuries yet after falling in a race and being trampled by several horses – seven broken ribs, several fractured vertebrae, a broken wrist and thigh and major concussion, as a result of which he spent two days in a coma. After recovering, he announced, at the age of fifty-seven, that he planned to race yet again. Grand National officials had other ideas and revoked his licence “for his own safety”, although the brave Duke continued to ride competitively in Spain up until 1985 – at the age of sixty-seven.

  Although the Iron Duke never achieved his childhood dream of a Grand National title, he did break a record – he sustained more fractures than any other jockey in the race’s history.

  Least Successful Racehorse Owner/Breeder

  Despite owning the largest stable in the UK, the wealthy aristocrat James Carr-Boyle, Fifth Earl of Glasgow (1792–1869) was the worst racehorse owner and breeder in the history of the sport.

  Part of the problem was the Earl’s refusal to give any of his horses names until they had proved themselves by actually winning a race. He was oblivious to the general confusion that this caused, especially when came to identifying which horses came from the best or worst bloodlines. One evening before a race, his trainer persuaded him to break his lifetime habit, so three of his horses ran with the names “Give-Him-a-Name”, “He-Hasn’t-Got-a-Name”, and “He-Isn’t-Worth-a-Name”.

  The Earl’s notoriously bad temper also got in the way. If a horse failed to show promise, h
e had it shot on the spot. After his daily gallop, he thought nothing of executing half-a-dozen horses; as most of them did not have names, it was anybody’s guess if the right ones ended up at the knacker’s yard.

  One that got away was the great Carbine, sensational winner of the Melbourne Cup, carrying a record weight of 10 st 5 lbs, setting a new race record time. In his career, Carbine won 33 races out of 43 starts, with six seconds and three thirds, failing to place only once due to a badly split hoof. The Earl had intended to have him shot at the age of two, despite his trainer’s pleas, but fate intervened when his lordship dropped dead himself.

  “Pish! A woman might piss it out.”

  Sir Thomas Bloodworth, Lord Mayor of London, on being informed of what would become the Great Fire of London, 1666

  Least Successful Investment in a Racehorse

  In 1983, Sheikh Mohammed paid a world record $10.2 million for the racehorse Snaafi Dancer. Sired by 1964 Kentucky Derby winner Northern Dancer, as yearlings go he was the nearest to a sure thing that had ever stepped into an auction ring.

  Snaafi Dancer never made it to the racetrack. It was reported that he was so slow in training that it would have been embarrassing to run him in public. He was retired to stud duty where he was discovered to have fertility problems. From two years of breeding, he sired only four foals, three of which raced with very limited success and none sired good runners. Retired, Snaafi Dancer was last reported as living somewhere in Florida.

  “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son. You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.”

  Jim Denny, Manager of “Grand Ole Opry”, to Elvis Presley, 1954

  Worst Tennis Player

  No sporting title drought was as painfully felt and as endlessly debated as Britain’s seventy-six-year wait for a men’s Grand Slam tennis champion.5 But fear not, the Great British Tennis Loser is still alive and kicking.

  Robert Dee from Bexley, Kent, didn’t win a single match during his first three years on the international professional circuit, touring at an estimated cost of £200,000 and a record fifty-four defeats in a row. But when he found himself being described in the press as “the worst professional tennis player in the world”, he decided he wasn’t going to take it lying down. Attacking with a single-mindedness he had never quite managed on the tennis court, he took legal action against dozens of newspapers and websites to defend his name and reputation.

  At last, Dee had some trophies to boast about on his personal website. But these trophies were not from international tennis tournaments, they were the apologies of thirty news organizations in response to threatened libel claims. Every one had backed down and settled up – all except the Daily Telegraph, who refused to give way over two articles, which it ran on the front page and in the sports section on 23 April 2008. Despite the threat of a libel trial that could have cost the paper £500,000, the headlines were unequivocal: “WORLD’S WORST TENNIS PRO WINS AT LAST” and “A BRITISH SENSATION – THE WORLD’S WORST”. The stories said Dee had finally ended this “dismal run” by beating an unranked seventeen-year-old in the first round of a tournament in Barcelona in April 2008,6 and compared him to the ski jumper Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards (see later entry, Where Eagles Daren’t).

  Dee was outraged and sued for defamation, arguing the piece exposed him to ridicule and could damage his ability to work in the tennis world in the future. In court, his barrister pointed out that Dee wasn’t quite as bad as everyone said, because he had won games on a Spanish domestic circuit during his fifty-four-match losing streak on the international circuit.

  But the Daily Telegraph stuck by its story – his wins on the Spanish national circuit did not alter the fact that he held the longest record for consecutive defeats based on the official world ranking system.

  The judge upheld the comments made by the newspaper – and Dee had to face up to yet another defeat.

  Least Successful Interpretation of “Non-Contact Sport”

  At the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Sigrid Fick and Gunnar Setterwall of Sweden were favourites to win gold in the outdoor mixed-doubles tennis. They were on top until Fick accidentally took out her partner with a forehand smash to the face with her racquet during the very first set.

  According to the Official Report of the 1912 Games, “This little accident put Setterwall off his game, for his play fell off tremendously.” They went on to lose 6-4, 6-0 to Heinrich Schomburgk and Dorothea Koring of Germany.

  “I’m sorry, Mr Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.”

  Editor of the San Francisco Examiner, to Rudyard Kipling, 1889

  Slowest Out of the Blocks

  It isn’t the winning that counts, it’s the taking part . . . or sometimes the just turning up. At the 1960 Games in Rome, Wim Essajas was the toast of Suriname, the first ever athlete from his country to qualify for the Olympics.

  He was scheduled to compete in the 800 metres on the track, but was accidentally given the wrong starting time. Thinking that the event was later that evening, he decided to take a nap and ended up sleeping through the race.

  Poor Essajas lost his only chance at glory and Suriname had to wait another eight years to field another Olympian.

  “An orgy of vulgar noise.”

  Louis Spohr, on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, 1808

  Chariots of Dire:

  Worst Olympic Marathons

  For pure farce, the early modern Olympic marathons were hard to beat. The first was run in 1896 in Greece from the city of Marathon to Athens. Twenty-five athletes put their names forward for the race but only seventeen started. The American team turned up too late to compete because they had forgotten that Greece still used the old Julian calendar and was eleven days ahead of them.

  The Italian Carlo Airoldi was favourite to win. He couldn’t afford to pay for transport to the event so he walked almost 1,000 miles from his home in Milan to Athens, only to be turned away when he got there. Airoldi had received prize money for winning a race and, as a professional athlete, was not eligible to compete. There was a strong suspicion that the Greeks had only blocked his application because they wanted their own man, a shepherd called Spyiridon Louis, to win – which he eventually did.

  On the way to victory, Louis overtook the leader Edwin Flack, a London-based Australian. Flack had no experience of running a marathon and, suffering from dehydration, became delirious, attacking a Greek spectator who tried to help keep him on his feet. The third-placed finisher Spyridon Belokas was disqualified for travelling part of the course by carriage.

  In Paris four years later, the pre-race favourite Georges Touquet-Daunis stopped for refreshments a few miles into the race. After a beer or two at a local hostelry, he decided it was much too hot to continue and stayed put. The course markings were so poor that several athletes got lost and could be seen running confused through central Paris. The American Arthur Newton finished fifth but insisted that nobody had overtaken him all day. Meanwhile, his fellow countryman Richard Grant claimed he had been deliberately run over by a cyclist as he was about to catch up with the leaders. It was widely suspected that the winner, local lad Michel Theato, had used his knowledge as a baker’s boy to take short-cuts.7

  The third Olympiad held in St Louis in 1904 was such a badly organized and shambolic affair that it threatened to kill off the modern Olympic movement altogether. Spread out over five months, the event was held alongside the much more popular and established World’s Fair and was reduced to little more than a sideshow. Suspecting it was going to be a disaster, Olympics founder Baron de Coubertin didn’t even bother to show up. He wasn’t alone: tensions caused by the ongoing Russo-Japanese War and the problem of getting to St Louis kept most of Europe’s top athletes away and only twelve countries were represented. Of the 625 competitors who turned up, 533 were American and in several events, including boxing, wrestling, tennis and gymnastics, they were virtually the only competitors. Unsurprisingly, the United States did rather well, winning 80 o
f the 100 gold medals and 238 of the 300 total medals.

  The 1904 marathon was run in energy-sapping conditions and over brutal terrain, starting in mid-afternoon in scorching August heat over badly rutted dirt roads with only one water stop. The course was described by the trainer of the eventual champion, Thomas J. Hicks, as “the most difficult a human being was ever asked to run over”.

  Exactly half of the starters failed to finish and there were a number of serious injuries, including American Bill Garcia who collapsed with a stomach haemorrhage. Of the eighteen who did complete the course, South Africa’s Len Tau still managed to finish ninth despite running barefoot and, at one stage, being chased a mile off course by an angry dog.

  First home, with a time of three hours thirteen minutes, was New Yorker Fred Lorz. The race officials were not overly concerned that Lorz looked a little too sprightly for someone who had just covered twenty-six miles in ninety-degree heat, nor were their suspicions raised when the second-placed runner, Tom Hicks, turned up looking half dead.

  They were just about to hang the gold medal around Lorz’s neck when word got out that he had covered the last eleven miles in a car. When confronted, Lorz owned up; suffering from cramps early in the race, he had hopped into his manager’s car at the thirteen-mile mark. They only managed eleven miles before the car broke down, so Lorz jumped out and decided to complete the race, claiming he did it as a joke. The Olympic officials handed him a lifetime ban.8 Second-placed Hicks, an English-born American, was awarded the gold. Hicks had crossed the finish line after three hours, twenty-eight minutes and fifty-three seconds, the worst marathon time in Olympic history, with more than a bit of help. What the officials hadn’t spotted was that his coach had assisted him – if that is the appropriate word – with strychnine (used as rat poison) and egg whites in brandy to keep him going. It was the first known incident of a drug-enhanced performance at the Olympics. Even then, Hicks was practically carried across the line.